@starryblush@witches.town @indi i guess it ties back to what i said a while ago, which is that giving everything a price in money is inherently reductive
i like things cos i like *the things*, not their monetary value - liking and wanting things feels different from liking and wanting money because things are useful for lots of purposes other than acquiring more things, whereas money is only good for the latter (and also for screwing over not-moneyed people)
@indi @starryblush@witches.town precisely! i think the best way to think about money is that it's just a means rather than an end in and of itself - if you treat it as an end then *that's* where you start to get a lot of the really predatory bullshit, cos you're just sitting on money that someone else could be *using to get stuff they need*
i have more nuanced thoughts about this but this margin doesn't have space enough to contain them
@typhlosion One thing that helps in all this kind of thought is to remember that "capitalism", as actually defined by economists, isn't "owning stuff", it's "owning stuff for the sake of making profits" ;)
@indi i guess my thought is that some of that is okay as long as you're, like, actually letting those profits circulate rather than hoarding them
making profit in the frame of "wanting to more easily obtain goods and services" is fine because how else would you do it? and that still lets the money go to other people who will then ostensibly use it for their own things. but using money as an amoral leaderboard is wrongheaded and, of course, exactly what's happening
@typhlosion @starryblush@witches.town Yeah one of the most baffling things to me about all the income inequality stuff is like "what the fuck are they DOING with all that money?" Because it doe sometimes feel like folks are just treating it as a high-score game.